The Family Tree

5

Tired as Dana was, she had only to look at Lizzie and her spirits soared. She called friends to share the news – Elizabeth Ames Clarke, seven pounds, nineteen inches, born at 7:23 a.m. She knitted between calls, nursed the baby again, had toast and tea, then stood over the crib until her legs wobbled, before crawling back into bed.

Sleep when the baby sleeps, Ellie Jo had advised more than once in the last few weeks, and Dana had read the same thing in books. More than sleep, though, she needed Hugh. That need kept her awake, worrying. She put a hand on her stomach, which was almost flat again. It was striking, the difference a few hours made.

Her insides tightened. Her uterus contracting? Possibly. More likely it was fear and, with Hugh absent, a whisper of loss.

Dana knew loss. It was a paramount theme of her early life. She had been five when her mother was ‘lost,’ but it was another three years before she could say the word ‘dead’ and several more after that before she could grasp what it meant.

‘Lost’ was a gentler word. Her grandmother used it repeatedly in the days after the sea had swept Elizabeth away. Dana had never seen her mother lifeless. They had been wading, and while Dana continued to play in the shallows, her mother swam out beyond the surf. Dana hadn’t seen her pulled away by the undertow. Nor did she see the wave that hit her own body and knocked her senseless. By the time she woke up in the hospital, ten days had passed, and the funeral was done. She never even saw her mother’s casket.

‘Lost’ meant that her mother could still be found. To that end, Dana spent hours in the yarn store with her eyes on the door, waiting, fearing that her world would positively fall apart if her mother didn’t come home.

The fear eased with time. The yarn shop was her port and Ellie Jo her anchor. But part of her always felt that little hole inside. Then she met Hugh, and the hole shrank.

Her eyes opened at the sound of the door. Trying to gauge Hugh’s mood, she watched him approach the bed. His focus was on Lizzie, sleeping now in the crook of her arm. His expression softened.

He did love this child. Dana knew he did. He had to. He was that kind of man.

‘Did you see David?’ he asked after a bit.

‘Sure did,’ Dana said lightly. ‘He was very sweet.’

‘What did he say?’

She didn’t go into David’s praise of the baby. That wasn’t what Hugh wanted to hear. ‘He said that one of us has African roots. He says it explains why he’s always felt connected to us.’

Hugh snorted. When Dana sent him a questioning look, he said, ‘I’m glad we’re connected. He’ll be able to tell us what we can expect down the road, his Ali being biracial and all.’

‘She’s arriving this week. She’ll be here until school starts.’

Hugh nodded. After a minute, he said, ‘Ali’s a sweetie. I love seeing her.’ After another silence, he looked down at the baby. ‘Can I hold her?’

Heartened, Dana carefully transferred her to Hugh’s arms. Lizzie didn’t wake.

He studied her. ‘She seems like an easy baby. Will this last?’

‘I just asked the nurse the same question. She said maybe yes, maybe no. Did you get something to eat?’

He nodded and glanced at the tray on the bedstand. ‘You?’

‘Some. Did you make more calls?’

‘Accessed messages, mostly. I talked with Robert. Dad’s in a stew.’

‘Then it’s good that this isn’t Dad’s baby,’ Dana remarked, mimicking Hugh. When he didn’t reply, she added, ‘Did you talk with him directly?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe you should. Get it out in the open.’

‘I’m not ready. My parents are … my parents.’

‘They’re elitist,’ Dana said.

‘That’s unfair.’

‘Does it fit?’

‘No,’ he replied, but not quickly enough.

‘Then it’s only the surprise that’s the problem,’ said Dana. ‘They’ll get over this, Hugh. It isn’t a tragedy.’

Shifting the baby in his arms, he turned and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘It isn’t,’ Dana insisted. ‘Tragedy is when a baby is born with a heart defect or a degenerative disease. Our baby is healthy. She’s responsive. She’s beautiful.’

‘She just isn’t us,’ Hugh said, sounding bewildered.

‘Isn’t us? Or just isn’t the us we know?’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘Yes. Babies are born all the time with features from earlier generations. It just takes a little digging to learn the source.’ When Hugh didn’t answer, Dana added, ‘Look at it this way. Having a baby of color will boost your image as the rebel lawyer.’ When Hugh snorted again, she teased, ‘You did want to be different, didn’t you?’ He didn’t reply. ‘Come on, Hugh,’ she pleaded. ‘Smile?’

The smile came only when he looked at the baby again. ‘She is special, that’s for sure.’

‘Have you taken any good pictures?’

He glanced toward his camera, which lay in the folds of her bag by the wall, and said with a brief burst of enthusiasm, even wonder, ‘Y’know, I have.’ Securing the baby in his left arm, he retrieved the camera and turned it on. With the ease of intimacy, he sat close beside Dana and scrolled through the shots with her. In that split-second of closeness, everything was right.

‘Omigod, look,’ she cried. ‘She’s what there – seconds old?’

‘And this one of you holding her for the first time.’

‘I look awful!’

He chuckled. ‘It wasn’t like you’d just been to a picnic.’ He pulled up another shot. ‘Look at those eyes. She’s remarkable. So aware from the start. And wait.’ He scrolled farther. ‘Here.’

Dana caught her breath. ‘Amazing you got that. She’s looking at me with total intelligence. Can you crop me out?’

‘Why would I want to? This is an incredible mother-daughter shot.’

‘For the announcement. We want one just of her.’

Hugh scrolled through several more pictures. ‘Here’s a nice one. I’ll print these up tonight and put them in the album you got at the shower.’

‘How about the announcement?’ Dana said again. ‘We need a picture for that. The stationery store promised they’d have them ready to go in a week once we give them everything.’

Hugh was focused on the monitor, scrolling forward and back. ‘I’m not sure any of these is perfect.’

‘Even that first one? I love it because she isn’t all swaddled. Her hands are so delicate.’

‘She’s still messed up from the birth in that one.’

‘Which gives it an immediacy,’ Dana coaxed. ‘But you can take more now.’

‘She’s sleeping now.’

Dana thought Lizzie’s features were as striking in sleep as when she was awake. ‘Oh, Hugh. I don’t want to wait. The envelopes are all addressed and stamped. There are so many people we want to tell.’

‘Most of them will know anyway,’ he said with sudden sharpness. ‘In fact, I’m not sure why we’re even sending announcements.’

Startled, Dana said, ‘But you were after me for weeks to make an appointment with the stationer. You insisted on coming. You chose the photo announcement and insisted you could get a good shot to use.’

He didn’t move, stayed close, yet she felt a chill seeping in. A moment later, he rose, put his camera away, and gently set the baby in the crib.

‘Hugh?’

When his eyes finally met hers, they were troubled. ‘I’m not sure we should include a picture with the announcement.’

Dana sank into her pillow. ‘You don’t want people to see her. But they will eventually. We can’t keep her in the house under wraps.’

‘I know. But sending a picture out now is only going to provoke questions.’ He took a quick breath. ‘Do we need to put ourselves on display? Word’ll spread about the baby anyway. People love to talk.’

‘So?’

‘So do we have to fuel the gossip? It’d be one thing if I could say that my wife’s grandfather was black.’

‘Why does it matter?’ Dana cried. She didn’t care if her grandfather was black. She didn’t care if her father was black. It wouldn’t change who she was.

Unfortunately, Hugh cared. ‘We need to locate your father.’

Dana was immediately defensive. ‘I suggested doing it before I was ever pregnant, and you said it didn’t matter. I said what if there was a medical problem, and you said you didn’t want to know and that if something arose we’d deal with it.’

‘That’s exactly what we’re doing. Dealing with it means tracking down your dad now. My man can do that.’

His man was Lakey McElroy. A computer nerd from a family of Irish cops, Lakey was socially inept, but very smart. Where his brothers knew the streets, he knew the hidden alleys. He also knew his way around the Web. On more than one occasion, he had found information that Hugh had given up on. If anyone could find Dana’s father, Lakey could.

Dana felt the old ambivalence – wanting to know, not wanting to know. Perhaps Hugh was right to insist. This wasn’t only about her anymore. It was about Lizzie, too.

‘We don’t have much to go on,’ she reminded him.

‘We have a name, and a picture. We have a place, a month, and a year.’

‘Roughly,’ she cautioned, because she had thought about this far more than he had. ‘My mother never said exactly when they were together, so it’s fine to count backward from the day I was born, but if she delivered me early or late, we could be wrong.’

‘You never asked?’

‘I was five when she died.’

‘Ellie Jo must know.’

‘She says no.’

‘What about your mom’s friends? Wouldn’t she have confided in them?’

‘I’ve asked before. I could ask again.’

‘Sooner rather than later, please.’

It was the please that bothered her – like this was a business matter, and she had let him down. She told herself it was only the Clarke seeping out through a crack in his otherwise human veneer, but tears filled her eyes. ‘I can’t do it now,’ she said. ‘I just had a baby.’

‘I’m not saying now.’ His cell phone vibrated. He looked at the ID panel. ‘Let me take this. It may help.’

Genevieve Falk was a geneticist whom Hugh had found years before when he needed a DNA expert for a case. She was intelligent and down-to-earth.

Now, standing at the window with the phone to his ear, he said a grateful, ‘Genevieve. Thanks for calling back.’

‘We’re on Nantucket, but you said it was urgent.’

‘I need your help. Here’s the scenario. A very white couple gives birth to a baby that has the skin and hair of an African American. Neither parents nor grandparents have remotely brown skin or curly hair. The assumption is that there’s an African-American connection further back – mabe a great-grandparent. Is this possible?’

‘Great-grandparent, singular? On only one side of the baby’s family? That’s not as probable as if there were such a relative on both sides.’

‘There isn’t. The baby’s father’s family is thoroughly documented.’

‘Was the mother adopted?’

‘No, but her father is an unknown quantity. In the one picture we have, he looks very blond.’

‘Looks don’t count, Hugh. Miscegenation has created generations of people with mixed blood. Some say that only ten percent of all African Americans today are genetically pure. If the other ninety percent have genetic material that is even partly white, and that material is further diluted with each level of procreation, not only would their features be white, but suddenly producing a child with African traits would be improbable.’

‘I don’t need to know what’s probable, only what’s possible,’ he said. ‘Is it possible for racial traits to lie dormant for several generations before reappearing? Can a light-skinned, blond-haired woman produce a child with non-Caucasian features?’

Genevieve sounded doubtful. ‘She can, but the odds are slim, especially if those several generations before were filled with blond-haired ancestors.’

Hugh tried again. ‘If, say, the baby’s grandfather was one-quarter black but passing for white, and the baby’s mother had no African-American features at all, could the baby inherit dark skin and tight curly hair?’

‘It would be rare.’

‘What are the odds?’

‘I can’t tell you, any more than we know the odds of a redhead appearing after several generations without.’

‘Okay. Then at what point would it become impossible?’

‘“Impossible” is not a word I like to use. Genetic flukes happen. Suffice it to say that the further back you have to look, the less probable your scenario becomes. Does the mom know of no black relatives?’

‘None.’

‘Then I’d suspect hanky-panky,’ Genevieve concluded bluntly. ‘Someone had an affair, and clearly it wasn’t the dad. Have your client do a DNA test to prove paternity. That would be the first and easiest line of attack. By the way, how’s your wife? Isn’t she due soon?’

*

Dana listened to Hugh’s half of the conversation with her eyes closed. She opened them the instant he ended the call. He looked so grim that her stomach began knotting. ‘Is it not possible?’

‘It is if your father has a healthy dose of African-American blood. The smaller that dose is, the more remote the chances.’

‘But it is possible,’ Dana repeated. ‘It has to be. I refuse to believe that if my father was first-or second-generation racially mixed, my mother wouldn’t have known. According to Gram Ellie, she truly didn’t know. Unless she was hiding it from everyone.’

Hugh stretched his neck, first to one side, then the other. ‘What Genevieve suggested,’ he said, ‘and this is a quote, is hanky-panky.’

‘Like the wife had an affair? Well, of course she suggested that. She’s used to working with you when you’re representing a client, and your clients aren’t saints. She would never have suggested it if she’d known you were talking about us. Why didn’t you tell her?’

‘Because it’s none of her business,’ he said. ‘And because I wanted an objective opinion.’

‘If you’d told her it was us, she might have been able to give an informed opinion.’

He made a sputtering sound. ‘They just don’t know the odds.’ Turning back to the window, he muttered, ‘I half wish you’d had an affair. At least, then, there’d be an explanation.’

‘So do I,’ Dana lashed back. ‘I’d like an explanation for why my mother died when I was five, or why my father never wanted to know about me, or why Gram Ellie’s Earl, who was the kindest, most loving person on earth, didn’t live to see me get married, but some of us don’t get explanations. Most of us aren’t privileged like you, Hugh.’

‘It’s just that this is all so bizarre. It’d be nice to have something concrete.’

‘Well, we don’t.’

He shot her a glance. ‘We will. If you talk to anyone who might have information on your father, even the slightest idea of where he was from, I’ll get Lakey on it. Will you ask? This is important, Dana. It isn’t idle curiosity. Promise me you will?’

Dana felt a stab of resentment. ‘I’m not blind. I see how important this is to you.’

‘It should be just as important to you,’ he shot back. ‘We wouldn’t be in this situation if you’d tracked your father down when you were young.’

‘And if I had found him and learned he was even the slightest bit black, would you have married me? Is there a racial limit to your love?’

‘No. There is not. I love this child.’

‘Love is a word, Hugh. But do you feel it? I need to know, both for Lizzie and for me.’

‘I can’t believe you’re asking me this.’

‘I can’t believe it either,’ Dana said. She could see him closing up before her eyes. Suddenly, he was a Clarke to the core.

‘You’re tired,’ he said coolly and headed for the door. ‘So am I.’

She might have called him back, might have apologized, might have begged. Her sense of loss was larger than ever.

Desperate to blunt it, she took her knitting from the bedside table and sank her fingers into the wool – a blend of alpaca and silk, actually. It was a deep teal color with a thread of turquoise, just enough to lend movement without muting the cables, popcorns, and vines she would incorporate into the piece.

She began working stitches from one needle to the next, doing row after row, cables and all, with the kind of steadiness that had kept her afloat for longer than she could recall. She couldn’t have said what size needle she was using, whether it was time for a popcorn, or if she was achieving the desired drape. She simply inserted the needle into a stitch, wrapped yarn around it, and pulled it through, again and again and again.

She needed to sleep, but she needed this more. Knitting restored her balance. She wished she was home, but not in the house overlooking the ocean. She wanted to take her baby to the one overlooking the orchard. It was at the end of a tree-lined lane, a stone path away from the yarn shop. Cradling Lizzie, she would sit with her feet up on the wicker lounger on Ellie Jo’s back porch, drinking fresh-squeezed limeade, eating warm-from-the-oven brownies, patting Veronica, Ellie Jo’s cat. Then she would take the baby down that short stone path – and, oh, the need was intense. Dana was desperate to sit at the long wood table with its bowl of apples in the middle. She longed to hear the whirr of the ceiling fan, the rhythmic tap-tap of needles, the soft conversation of friends.

If she had any history at all – any place where she was loved unconditionally – that was it.

6

The arrival of new yarn at The Stitchery was always an event. New colors from Manos, textures from Filatura di Crosa, blends from Debbie Bliss and Berroco – once a box was open, word spread through the knitting community with astonishing speed, bringing the mildly curious, the seriously interested, the addicted. In the days following shipments, particularly as a new season approached, Ellie Jo knew to expect an increase in visitors. She also knew who would like what, who would buy what, and who would admire a new arrival but buy an older favorite.

Ellie Jo was as eager for new yarn as any of her customers. Rarely did she put skeins in a bin without holding one out. Her excuse, a perfectly legitimate one, was the need to swatch a sample to tack to the bin, so that customers could see how the yarn would look knit up. What that did, of course, was to let Ellie Jo sample the yarn, herself. If she liked the feel of it as she knit and the way it came out, she ordered skeins for herself.

Today, as she returned from visiting Dana and the baby, she wanted to stop at her house first. But the UPS truck was parking in front of The Stitchery, and, with the store still ten minutes shy of opening, someone had to let the man in.

So she stopped beside him in the small pebbled lot, unlocked the door, and showed him where to put the boxes. He had barely left when her manager, Olivia McGinn, arrived wanting to know all about Dana, again distracting Ellie Jo from her chores at the house. Other customers arrived, and the shop was abuzz.

There was excited talk about the baby, excited talk about Dana, excited talk about the boxes. Ellie Jo wasn’t sure she would have been able to concentrate enough to actually sell yarn. Fortunately, Olivia could do that. Indeed, at that very moment, she was waiting on a mother and her twenty-something daughter who were just learning to knit and wanted novelty yarns for fall scarves.

Customers like these were good for sales; novelty yarn was expensive and quickly worked, which meant that if the customer enjoyed herself, she would soon be back for more. One scarf could lead to a hat, then a throw, then a sweater. If that sweater was cashmere at upwards of forty dollars a skein, with eight or more skeins needed, depending on size and style, the sale could be hefty. Moreover, a year from now, this mother or her daughter might be one of those to rush to the shop when there was word new yarns had arrived.

That was how business worked. Ellie Jo had learned through trial and error, after her initial resistance to selling these same pricey items. Natural fibers remained her favorites, but if novelty yarns brought in trend-seekers who subsidized the shop’s more organic tastes, who was she to complain? In recent years, she had developed the utmost respect for innovation.

That was why, putting off her return to the house a bit longer, she took a box-cutter and opened the first of the new boxes. This was no novelty yarn. A blend of cashmere and wool, the skeins included the golds, oranges, deep rusts, and dark browns that would be big for fall. The line was a new one for The Stitchery, but from Ellie Jo’s first view of it at the knitting show in April, she had known it would sell.

The front door dinged yet again, and Gillian Kline excitedly called her name. Gillian taught English at the nearby community college, an occupation whose hours were flexible enough to allow for frequent visits to the shop. She was fifty-six, of modest height and a weight that had her forever dieting, but her most marked feature was a head of red waves that had neither faded in color nor thinned with age.

Now, with that hair caught up in a fuchsia clasp that only Gillian would dare wear, and a bouquet of pink roses in her hand, she went straight to Ellie Jo and gave her a long hug. Gillian had been one of Elizabeth’s closest friends, and in the years since her death had been a surrogate daughter. Neither gave voice to the fact that Elizabeth should have been here to welcome her granddaughter.

‘For you, Great-Gram Ellie,’ said Gillian. ‘Your Lizzie is perfect.’

Ellie Jo lit up. ‘You’ve seen her?’ She took the flowers, which were taken from her seconds later and put in water.

‘Just now,’ Gillian said and rummaged in the satchel that hung from her shoulder. ‘Hours old, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’ In no time, she had a picture of Dana and the baby on the monitor of her digital camera, for the other women to admire.